David, Well, I hope you hang around for a long time. Move to southern Florida! That's what I did. Renting a nice apartment is cheap (there's a glut of building), even in the ``fancy'' addresses (Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, Delray Beach, West Palm Beach). Everything is flat, so it's easy to get around on a bicycle, and a lot of people do. No snow or ice. Rain is intermittent in the summer and unusual in the winter. There are thousands of valet parking jobs, that pay about $5 per car, and it must be possible to do 40 to 60 cars in a 4 or 5 hour stretch. Because the median age has got to be about 75 around here, there is valet parking not only at restaurants and hotels, but at shopping malls, movie theaters, you name it. If you can afford it, try a career management firm. They are more than placement services, and offer short courses on resume writing, interviewing, and generally how best to present yourself to potential employers and how to find potential employers. Unlike recruiters, they do a whole lot more than send you to random interviews. They'll really hold your hand through the whole process. A really good one in northern NJ is Lee Hecht Harrison, _www.lhh.com_ (http://www.lhh.com) . Or (or and) take a couple of the actuarial exams. Property/casualty insurance is growing and there is a greater and greater demand for quantitative experts of any sort. Sound boring? Currently I'm involved in comparing how much workers compensation costs to treat a given injury versus what it costs in the group health system. It involves taking millions of records for medical transactions and distilling out conclusions that the less technically educated in the industry will find interesting. And doing Bayesian analysis using WinBUGS to forecast all sorts of things of interest in a statistically sound way. In the group I'm in there are 4 of us that have Masters of PhDs from UC Berkeley in math, two Yale PhDs (one in math and one in econ), and two other econ PhDs. There are serious intellectuals outside academia these days. An we don't have to publish or perish (although we have produced some good publications). Branch out. If you can make enough to live on in a 40 to 60 hour week, that leaves a lot of time to pursue hobbies, like math. Hang in there. If for no other reason than to see what happens next. John John Robertson 561-272-0356 jpr2718@aol.com